Radix vs Solana

Consensus & Scalability

Solana uses Tower BFT with Proof of History (PoH) for transaction ordering. It achieves ~5,000 real TPS (theoretical max ~65,000) through aggressive hardware requirements — validators need high-end servers with 256GB+ RAM and fast NVMe storage.

Radix uses Cerberus with braided sharding. Each shard processes transactions independently; cross-shard transactions are braided atomically. Throughput scales linearly with shard count on commodity hardware.

Asset Model

Solana uses the SPL Token standard with a program-based model. Better than EVM's approach (accounts own tokens, not contracts), but still requires program-level approvals for DeFi interactions.

Radix uses native assets managed by the Radix Engine itself. No program-level approvals. Assets are physical resources that move in buckets.

Key Tradeoffs

Solana's strengths: Large ecosystem, high throughput already live, extensive DeFi, strong memecoin and NFT culture, fast finality.

Radix's strengths: Linear scalability without hardware ceiling, native asset security model, readable transactions, atomic composability across shards, commodity hardware validators.